


My life flashes before my eyes, and I think 'my gods look at that stupid haircut I had in fifth-grade'

by AuntyAgonee



Category: Pacific Rim (2013), Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, The Kane Chronicles - Rick Riordan
Genre: Apocalyptic Scenario, Children put at risk, Freeform, Gen, Nico and Percy are bros, Span of years, Strong platonic relationships, Titans are the Kaiju
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-21
Updated: 2015-08-21
Packaged: 2018-04-16 10:54:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4622661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuntyAgonee/pseuds/AuntyAgonee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So, we suited up. And suddenly, like I said before, I was dozens of feet tall and had arms like school-buses and had Carter in the back of my mind, his thoughts abuzz with fear and excitement. Carter and I looked at each other through our helmets in the control room- the head. We did what came naturally.<br/>We spun around and asked our battle partner, a much older Jaeger who was famed for taking no shit from no one: “Does our butt look fat in this?”</p>
<p>In which the young, prodigy pilot Percy Jackson has a few seconds to remember his short and painful life before his short and painful death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My life flashes before my eyes, and I think 'my gods look at that stupid haircut I had in fifth-grade'

**Author's Note:**

> While writing this, I imagined the Titans as a kind of mash-up of the stuff that stomps around in SNK, naked as sin and chomping and everything, and the intelligent, vain bastards that keep trying to squish our favourite demigods. Make of that what you will, I guess.

Nobody tells you what it’s gonna be like to be in a Jaeger.  
Ok, so, granted, if I had to explain it to people who had never had the experience what it was like to suddenly have a whole other person whispering at the back of your head, and to be dozens of feet tall and tonnes heavy and to look at your arms, as thick as school-buses and think, ‘this is all attached to me’, I wouldn’t be able to do anything but list. Like I just did, right there.  
But there are more eloquent pilots than me. Pilots who can capture the true nature of a one-on-one battle in its terrifying reality for the uninitiated masses. Pilots who can sum up the terror you feel looking into a Titan’s face for the first time, through the thick screen of electric statistics and readings and glass they assure you will never break. I’m not one of them.  
When I think about Jaegers, I always think about my first time in one of them.  
I was twelve years old, which was totally illegal. Legally, you have to be over sixteen to set foot in one of them. Scientists are still worried about the adverse effects it’s going to have on our health. But as my good buddy Piper put in one interview: “I don’t worry about the long-term health-effects because there’s no way I’m gonna live long enough to suffer them.”  
Who gives a shit?  
Being a pilot is my job. It’s not the only thing I’m good at by a longshot, but it’s my life. My friends are all pilots. My girlfriend’s a pilot. My mother was a pilot before me, which is probably what makes me compatible. They think these things are genetic, for some reason. This kind of enhanced mental capacity.  
But I was telling a story, wasn’t I?  
I was twelve years old. I was graduating from the one-man, little Jaegers the tech teams call ‘Trouble-makers’, because that’s what they’re good for against Titans, but not the big kills. The biggest thing I had ever controlled was only about as big as a two-story house, and me and my drift-partner, Carter, had only done a few neural handshakes at the time.  
So, we suited up. And suddenly, like I said before, I was dozens of feet tall and had arms like school-buses and had Carter in the back of my mind, his thoughts abuzz with fear and excitement. Carter and I looked at each other through our helmets in the control room- the head. We did what came natural.  
We spun around and asked our battle partner, a much older Jaeger who was famed for taking no shit from no one: “Does our butt look fat in this?”  
They named us Little Blue, because of course, we’re fucking huge.

I remember the first drop.  
It was us, Little Blue, and Nico and Jason, Aegis Smile. They were even more illegal than us because at the time, Nico was only eleven years old. He was such a small kid they had to specially modify his suit to fit him, otherwise it went all baggy and his actions got read too late. His little body dealt with the strain well- always has too, since he’s never gotten much bigger than 5 foot 5 inches and, I swear to the gods this is true, has never been heavier than 101 pounds. He still gets nosebleeds from the strain sometimes.  
So, picture it. There me and Carter are, shitting ourselves in a massive robot. And there’s Aegis Smile, all cool and calm and collected. A veteran of five drops already, and each one of them a roaring success.  
There was a Titan in the harbour of Vladivostok. Making slow, steady progress to the docks where the city started. Buck-ass-nude (even though Titans have no junk to speak of) with a little cloud of parasitic monsters floating around it.  
And we were gonna take it down. The thing was so fucking huge, the deep water only came up to its waist.  
The first time, I wasn’t very brave. I didn’t have to be. I was just a scared little kid and I was with guys that could be considered veterans to me.  
“I’m not going near that thing.” I said about two seconds after seeing it.  
“I concur. Not happening.” said Carter.  
Our heartbeats raced, but were matched on the vitals-readings.  
“Fine,” said Nico over the coms, his voice still high and girlish because of his tender age “Stay there. If we die, you can carry our severed head back to base and explain it to my sister.”  
“Not good enough, guys.” said Jason, whose voice was going to break in two weeks “You know your moves and your training. If we get in trouble, you’re gonna have to jump in.”  
Then they strolled off. I mean, literally, strolled off, like the twin swords their Jaeger carried was a cane and an umbrella, and the Titan heading for the city was a friendly neighbour.  
They didn’t end up needing any help. Nico’s famous for this move he does where he uses the arm he controls to behead a Titan in one, clean swoop while Jason holds it down or positions it with his arm.  
That’s what he did. The move was hesitant at the time, but by the time he got to about thirteen and a half, he was beheading things like a pro.  
Carter and I did end up getting work-out, since there was another one. Much thanks to the boys and girls and the in-between for not noticing that one on the satellite, those jerks.  
It sprang up out of the deep and put its thick arms around our neck, probably intending to tear us out by the head and take the spine with it, so the suit would be useless. Titans aren’t that smart, but they get how Jaegers work, after so many years of this war.  
Carter and I filled our coms with screaming. Like the assholes they were, Aegis Smile stood back and let us do our first fight alone.  
Carter had a dagger attached to his thigh. I had the sword. We swung at the same time, and Carter cut its fingers off, and I cut both its arms away. The Titan latched onto us with its strong jaws, although it sharp teeth basically skidded off our smooth metal skin. As one, Carter and I grabbed an arm each and threw it over our heads. The thing flew half-way across the harbour. The splash it made when it landed soaked the docks, Little Blue, and Aegis Smile.  
When the rush of blood in my ears finally faded a little, I realised that Aegis Smile was clapping slowly for us.  
“Good job,” they said in unison “But you better make sure it’s dead. Double-tap.”

I remember my first day in the facility.  
The very first memory I have comes from that day. Director Chiron was wheeling down the hall in his chair, and I was walking at his side, feeling sick to my stomach. Seven years old. About to meet the people who Chiron assured me were going to be like my family, from now on.  
“I understand you are frightened, Percy, but you must do this. You were chosen to do this.”  
For a little kid, I was surprisingly sceptical “Nu-uh. I was made to do this,” I remember searching for the word I had once heard a nurse saying about me “Designed to do this. In my…in my DNA. I don’t get a choice.”  
Chiron nodded “You know what they say about greatness.”  
“Some people work for it and some people just get shoved into it?” I suggested grimly.  
“For heavens’ sake, Percy, smile. You don’t have to set foot in a fully-fledged Jaeger for another nine years at least.”  
That was the first lie Chiron told me. Maybe he didn’t know it was a lie. He certainly protested the first time they stuck the first under-aged drifted pair into a Jaeger (Nico, at ten, and Jason at twelve) like he didn’t know this was ever going to happen.  
But Chiron’s infamous among my group of friends for lying.

I’m sorry. I really am trying to put this into chronological order. But I can’t quite get my facts straight. When life flashes before your eyes, it doesn’t do it in order.  
I remember what Carter remembers. When you go into the drift, you take back a couple of pieces of your drift-partner.  
Carter wasn’t as lucky as I was. He got scooped off the streets, like Leo, who they found living completely on his own in a ruined city full of the dead, and like Annabeth, who was almost feral when they found her living in a city that was losing more and more of itself to the Titans every day. Carter remembers when the staff found him. He sent his little sister ahead to run away as fast as she could, because they knew the stories of the men in the white vans that come around the cities at night. In times like these, the market for children and girl-slaves has actually risen out of the black-market to become lucrative, if completely evil and scummy, businesses that ordinary, good people have to take every precaution against. Little Carter (he was so cute when he was little, it’s almost crimimal) knew this and knew his duties as the older sibling. He was caught first, by the staff.  
His little sister tore out of cover and stabbed our now favourite doctor in the leg with a piece of scrap metal, then bit his hand and swallowed his wedding ring. To this day, Dr Solace hasn’t asked for it back and I’m not sure if it ever came out of the other side.  
They were taken away. I remember the white, blank terror Carter felt when he had slept off the sedatives they had given him. And I remember myself, sitting curious at his bedside to wait for him to awake.  
The very first thing I said to my drift-partner was: “You’re a lot younger than I thought you would be.”  
He was six at the time, and I was eight. They recruit very early, for efficiency.

 

I remember Leo.  
I think I must have mentioned him early, because it’s kinda hard not to gush about our mechanic. Seriously, he’s great. A child genius. He has already revolutionised our team of Jaegers with new attack and defence capabilities and he’s going to be the head of his field some day. Probably inside this year, if he continues at this rate. He’s also bat-shit insane, but you know, it’s an occupational hazard of the job.  
He talks in our coms a lot of the time. Leo happens to be drift-compatible. With Nico and Hazel’s big sister Bianca, whom I inadvertently killed on my third mission. They keep telling me it’s not my fault, everyone, but I know if I had just summoned my courage and charged the Titan before it tossed her into its jaws, I could have snatched her way. So, with his partner dead and eaten, Leo takes up the job of a navigator when the rest of us are in the cockpit.  
I remember how good he was the one time I had to drift with Hazel for a mission. Both of our partners, Sadie and Carter, came down with the ‘flu at the same time the way siblings will. He guided us through this hell of a city, like an impenetrable maze that was stuffed with Titans, to retrieve a fellow Jaeger in distress.  
He alternated between telling stupid, funny stories and giving us strict directions.  
“…so I’m cornered, right? Officer Octavian has this look in his eye that suggests either murder or unsolicited sodomy and I know it looks fucking terrible for me, because the sirens are still blaring from the false alarm and I’m right next to the control switch. Of course I’m trying to fix it, but that guy wouldn’t believe a house was on fire if he was standing in it- alter your course by fifteen degrees and watch your port side for class 2 Titans, at minimum five, at maximum nine. So I didn’t even try to pretend I was comfortable with the situation. I just scream ‘You’ll never take me alive!’ and dart between his legs, and since I’m about two inches thick, it’s easy as hell, and then when I’m going around the corner I’m just possessed by this demon of sass. So I turn around and look at him, looking at me like I’m a nutcase, and hiss ‘because I’m already dead inside’, then I run like my ass is on fire.”  
Hazel and I got through a mission at fifteen and twelve that most seasoned veterans of thirty years and up wouldn’t have been able to in their most focussed state, and all the way through we were laughing like lunatics and fogging up the insides of our helmets.  
Leo’s good like that.

I remember that I have no family, except for Frank.  
Frank is my first cousin. My mother and his mother were half-sisters, we think. It could be that I am just as Chinese as Frank and his mother, and it’s just that my mom didn’t look her ethnicity and didn’t pass the physiognomy onto me either, in which case our blood link is stronger than we think. They don’t tell us much about our parents, except that they were all once great heroes and warriors and scholars. The standard bullshit.  
The only picture I have of my mother has Frank’s mother in it too. Two women sit on the shoulders of the Jaeger they piloted together. One is tall, slim and beautiful. The other is a chubby, freckled snub of a woman with a lot of black hair that sticks up at funny angles. It is labelled on the back in the handwriting of Annabeth’s father: ‘Emily and Sally’.  
They still haven’t told us which one is Sally and which one is Emily. We only ever hear about them by their last names, Zhang and Jackson, so Frank and I have no idea which first name belongs to which dead mother.  
I remember Frank likes to save me in battle.  
Well, he doesn’t like to do it. But he does it a lot. He’s always got my and Carter’s back. His drift partner is Reyna, who is one of the scariest people on the planet, next to Nico and my girlfriend Annabeth. They pilot what we affectionately call the Caterpillar, because it can burrow into the earth.  
I remember the last battle I was in where Frank had to save me. Carter and I were pinned under the strong hands of at least five or six Titans. Many more mouths than that were open and dripping all over our windshield. Carter and I wriggled and fought and tried to active the oil-skin, which is a thing that covers us in oil and sets us on fire so we can’t be touched, but it had been ripped off of us by some Titan that knew what they were doing.  
I thought I was going to die. So instead of coming up with some clever, last-ditch plan, I reached across the cockpit and held Carter’s hand.  
He told me he loved me, no homo, and that he couldn’t have asked for a better drift partner.  
I told him I loved him too, yes homo, and got one last laugh out of him.  
Inches before the first Titan sank its teeth into our chipped helmet’s windshield, the Titans were torn from us. Torn and thrown in pieces, into the distance. The world swam back into focus and I realised Leo was half hysterical on the coms, shouting at us to get the fuck up and fight the hell back. The second we could move an arm again, my arm, I wrenched another Titan off of us and struggled back to my feet. Caterpillar was there. One last Titan was ripped off of us and the Caterpillar knocked its forehead affectionately against ours.  
“Be careful,” was all that Frank said.  
He has only spent the first six years of his life in Canada, but we all joke he’s too Canadian to say a mean word anyway.  
Reyna, on the other hand, ripped us a new one.

And I remember my friends.  
My friends are great. Like, really, really great. Chiron was right that they would be my family from then on, however much else he lied about.  
My best friend aside from Carter is probably Nico. It’s a pre-determined fact that your best friend for life will be your drift partner, but I also got pretty lucky when it comes to the other best friends. For the longest time, there was a lot of stuff in the way of us being friends. That includes but does not extend to a massively unhealthy crush and the fact that I kind of let his sister die, and a whole mess of other emotional complications that made us incompatible as friends.  
That’s all gone now. The last thing I remember doing with him was lying flat on the couch while he tried to toss Skittles into my mouth from his regular, cushy arm-chair. If I’m remembering it right, we were having a debate about the purity of the system that had indoctrinated us into this life-style. Or about superhero names…  
No, yeah, it was super-hero names.  
“All I’m saying is that Ghost King is a good, solid name.” I said.  
He tossed a yellow Skittle at me. It bounced off my nose and settled in my collarbone, next to a grape one I had refused to retrieve, because the grape ones are poisonous.  
“It sounds so presumptuous,” he protested “I mean, who decided I was the Ghost King? Monarchy has almost completely died out. The idea of having an elite, ruling class dictated by blood-lines and incestuous marriage that were worshipped and supported by the salaries of their peon nation is entirely redundant in today’s democratic society. Well, semi- democratic, martial law society. Anyway I refuse to associate myself with anything that approves of incestuous marriage.”  
He tossed me another Skittle, which I did catch. I fished its fallen comrade out of my man-cleavage and sucked the two of them into a spicy, tart ball, which I showed him on the tip of my tongue.  
He wrinkled his button nose “Why did you think I needed to see that?”  
“Aren’t you proud of me and my skills?”  
“Congrats, Perce. You’re probably a good kisser.”  
I felt the need to give my hips a wiggle I thought was seductive and bat my eyelashes at him “You’ll never know.”  
He rolled his eyes and punished me by throwing two grapes in a row.  
I remember…I remember that happened no too long ago.  
Maybe this morning.  
Isn’t it still the morning?  
I don’t know what fucking time it is, or where I am.

I remember one last thing.  
My girlfriend. I can’t tell you a bunch of miscellaneous things about her, like the last time we talked, or kissed, or what the name of her drift-partner is or what the name of her Jaeger is. My head isn’t quite right at the moment. There’s a distinct possibility that it has been crushed.  
When I dove in front of Carter to protect him from…whatever the fuck it was that was going to hurt him, I didn’t have time to think about which bits of me were going to be damaged.  
But I can tell you that pilots have short lives, and that I wanted to give her every last second I had left in mine. I can tell you that I was going to marry that girl. I can tell you that I’ve been in love with her for a long, long time, and I don’t plan to ever stop being in love with her.  
And that’s all I can tell you.

 

I open my eyes.  
Carter is above me, covered in blood. Distantly, a siren blares. The room is lit up in a low, red lighting that means some kind of giant, screaming emergency is in progress.  
“We should suit up.” my voice is weak, my throat parched.  
For some reason I am arranged in Carter’s lap, cradled like a child. My head rests on his shoulder. There’s a trickle of salty wetness dripping off his chin and onto my nose, which is itchy. I want to lift my arm to wipe them off, but I can’t move it.  
“We should. But we’re not gonna this time. The others have us covered.”  
Something is very wrong with him. When you have been drifting as long as he and I have, you get to be able to tell at the slightest vocal inflection, hesitation, when something is wrong with your partner.  
“Carter?”  
He smiles at me, but his smile is strained “Do me a favour and shut your eyes, Percy.”  
I shut my eyes obediently “Why is it so cold in here?”  
“Somebody probably broke the heater. We’re in the middle of a blizzard, you know.”  
Do I know that? I don’t know what I know. I can’t remember anything but what went in front of my eyes, and that was in the fragment of a fragment of a second.  
Carter presses something thin and sharp to my throat.  
“What’s that?”  
“Nothing.”  
“Are you sure it’s nothing?”  
“I promise it’s nothing.”  
The sharpness pushes down and moves across my throat. A lot of hot stuff spills out of my skin and I want to ask Carter if I just wet myself through my neck, but I can’t speak anymore.  
“It’s nothing,” he repeats, over and over “It’s nothing…it’s nothing…it’s nothing.”


End file.
